The Truth About Personal Growth

Carl Rogers, one of the most influential psychologists of the last century, had a childhood memory that reveals something essential about human nature. His family stored potatoes in a dark basement for winter, with only one tiny window letting in a sliver of light. In near-total darkness, with no soil and no water, those potatoes began growing pale, weak sprouts reaching toward that faint light. Even a potato in a dark basement cannot help but try to grow. Rogers called this the "actualizing tendency"—the built-in drive every living thing has to grow toward its full potential until the day it dies.

Rob Dial, host of The Mindset Mentor, spent the first fifteen or sixteen years of his personal development work believing he was headed somewhere specific. He thought if he worked hard enough on himself, he would eventually reach a destination where his problems and neuroses would disappear. He would sit on his couch, enlightened, floating off into nirvana with nothing left to do. Then he heard an interview with Ram Dass, the Harvard psychology professor turned spiritual teacher, who said something that stopped him cold. Ram Dass was eighty years old and had been working on himself for sixty years. His neuroses were still there. All of them. Dial realized: if Ram Dass hadn't gotten past it, he wasn't going to either. And that realization, instead o